Unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in the present disclosure and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Memory devices are employed in many types of electronic devices, such as computers, cell phones, PDA's, data loggers, and navigational equipment, just to name a few examples. Among such electronic devices, various types of nonvolatile memory devices may be employed, such as NAND or NOR flash memories, SRAM, DRAM, and phase-change memory, just to name a few examples. In general, writing or programming processes may be used to store information in such memory devices, while a read process may be used to retrieve stored information.
Flash memories typically preserve stored information even in power-off conditions. In such memories, in order to change a logic state of a cell, e.g. a bit, an electric charge present in a floating gate of the cell may be changed by application of electric potentials to various portions of the cell. A “0” state typically corresponds to a negatively charged floating gate and a “1” state typically corresponds to a positively charged floating gate. As intended, a nonvolatile memory may preserve stored information over time, but a reliability of such a memory may be limited by degenerative processes affecting a tunnel oxide of the memory during various programming and erasing cycles. As a cell is programmed and erased, electrons move to and from the floating gate through the tunnel oxide. Such electrons may create “traps” in the oxide (i.e., defects in the oxide in which electrons may be trapped). Trap density may increase with the number of program and erase cycles experienced by the tunnel oxide. Due to the presence of these traps, a programmed or erased floating gate may show an enhanced charge loss and/or charge gain even under relatively low electric fields across the tunnel oxide commonly seen during normal conditions of storage and reading of the cell. Such low level charge loss and/or charge gain mechanisms, which may lead to information loss, are undesirable since flash memory devices are expected to be able to store information on the order of at least several years. Accordingly, these nonvolatile memory devices may comprise memory cells that slowly deteriorate over time, leading to an increasing probability that a read and/or write error may occur upon accessing such a memory cell. Though such errors may be subsequently corrected within a memory device, for example, such error correction may become difficult or impossible as the number of errors increases.